Posts Tagged: Orbit Books

Cier’Djaal, once the crowning glory of the civilized world, has gone from a city to a battlefield and a battlefield to a graveyard. Foreign armies clash relentlessly on streets laden with the bodies of innocents caught in the crossfire. Cultists and thieves wage shadow wars, tribal armies foment outside the city’s walls, and haughty aristocrats watch the world burn from on high.

As his companions struggle to keep the city from destroying itself, Lenk travels to the Forbidden East in search of the demon who caused it all. But even as he pursues Khoth-Kapira, dark whispers plague his thoughts. Khoth-Kapira promises him a world free of war where Lenk can put down his sword at last. And Lenk finds it hard not to listen.

When gods are deaf, demons will speak.

In all likelihood, this is an unfinished catalogue cover and will change (slightly or wholly) before release. The Mortal Tally is the follow-up to Sam Sykes’ The City Stained Red and is due for release from Orbit Books on January 5th, 2016.

Looking good! No surprise, since all three covers for Ann Leckie’s series come from the same piece of John Harris art, but Orbit has put together another nice cover for Ancillary Mercy, the concluding volume in the Imperial Radch trilogy. The only shame? No hardcover release for the trilogy.

Ann Leckie, author of the much lauded, and many award winning, novel, Ancillary Justice, announced on her blog that her Imperial Radch series has been optioned for television by Fabrik and Fox Television Studios. “They have previously worked together on The Killing for four seasons on AMC and Netflix,” Leckie said, “and they started their relationship with Burn Notice.”

Leckie warns her fans not to get too far ahead of themselves, though, citing Hollywood’s glacial pacing and labyrinthine nature. “Ancillary Justice has been optioned for TV,” she said. “Now, ‘optioned’ doesn’t necessarily mean that anything is going to actually happen–things get optioned and then never made, quite frequently.’

With the production of a television adaptation of James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series in full production, this is a great time to be a fan of televised science fiction. Though the question begs to be asked, where Corey’s work is straight forward science fiction with all the fixins for television, Leckie’s series is a whole different beast, and many of its strongest facets — such as its handling of gender, and its protagonist’s preternatural cognitive abilities granted to her as an ancillary — may prove difficult to adapt to a television script.

“Bringing [Ancillary Justice] to any sort of screen (not counting your eReader screen, of course!) would be… an interestingly difficult project,” Leckie admitted. “I made sure to have a conversation with the folks at Fabrik about my specific concerns–namely, the approach to gender, and the issue of whitewashing (as in, I do not want to see the book whitewashed, I would like to namedrop LeGuin and mention her Earthsea experience here, thank you). I was very pleased with their response.”

When her debut novel, Ancillary Justice, released in 2014, nobody expected it to hit the science fiction community like a nuclear bomb. But it did. And Leckie was dancing the whole way through.

It was a firecracker of a novel — small and intense — but the unusual narrative structure and Leckie’s bold take on gender might have limited the audience to the most passionate and feminist-minded readers. Instead, the exact opposite happened: Ancillary Justice wasn’t a small snap, crackle, pop in a corner of fandom, it was a conflagration of love and adoration heard ’round the community.

Ancillary Justice won almost every major literary award for science fiction and fantasy in 2014, including the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel, and has sold over 30,000 copies to date, proving that not only is there a market for progressive, thoughtful space opera, there’s a thirst for it among readers. Ancillary Justice was a huge critical and commercial success, but with that success comes a lot of pressure for a sequel that lives up to its predecessor and satisfies its many fans. Writing under that sort of pressure can be the first stumbling point for many first time novelists, but Leckie never misses a beat. Read More »

(Okay, I actually have more than one response, natch, so bear with me. Orbit Books is one of the few big SFF publishers that understands the value in building a brand for its authors. When they weren’t happy with Brent Weeks’ cover for The Black Prism, they recovered the whole series and created an eye-catching and instantly recognizable series on bookstore shelves. They’ve done so with James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse, and Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series. The packaging and branding for Daniel Abraham’s The Dagger and the Coin was never their finest work, but it was bold and the emblematic weapon (sword, axe, torch, shield and spear) were consistent and matched scale. Read More »